Confirmed on my Latitude D420 El mié, 02-07-2008 a las 19:33 +0000, BackwardsDown escribió: > I confirm on a Dell D830. > > -- > HAL lockups/crashes on Dell D-series Latitudes w/ BIOS password > https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/189814 > You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber > of the bug. > > Status in The Dell Project: New > Status in The libsmbios project: Confirmed > Status in “hal” source package in Ubuntu: Triaged > Status in “libsmbios” source package in Ubuntu: Triaged > > Bug description: > This description is totally rewritten by Andrea Ratto (LP andrearatto) to > recap the situation. The root cause has been really hard to find as it seemed > a kernel issue related to the touchpad at first. > The problem reported here and its cause have already been confirmed by at > least 5 users. > This bug refers primarily to HAL, but also relates to libsmbios. It is > triggered by gnome-power-manager, but it's not its fault. > > Symptoms: > very frequent temporary lock-ups on input after some inactivity > frequent hard lock-ups with CAPS lock and NUM lock flashing > very frequent loss of synchronization with the touchpad, which then looses > advanced functionalities; with this in dmesg > [ 804.829840] psmouse.c: GlidePoint at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost > synchronization, throwing 4 bytes away. > [ 807.405427] psmouse.c: resync failed, issuing reconnect request > [ 810.926845] input: PS/2 Mouse as /devices/virtual/input/input9 > [ 810.973805] input: AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint as > /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input10 > > Affected hardware: > Latitude D620, D420, D630 with a BIOS password set > > Releases affected > Hardy & Intrepid > Other Distros are affected too, e.g. Fedora 9. > > What is known so far: > gnome-power-manager tries to dim the brightness of the screen after some > inactivity and then reset it upon input. > This is a default setting, so the user has no clue of what might be causing > the issue. > gnome-power-manager calls HAL to do the job. HAL on dell machines, since > hardy, uses libsmbios for brightness setting. > > Libsmbios needs the BIOS password even to change the brightness and HAL has > no way to tell it that password, as of now. Some users have also reported > that libsmbios does not work even from the command line utility, specifying > the pass. > > However, instead of just printing an error when it fails, it makes the > computer lock for a few seconds, due to the direct interaction with the bios > on a very low level. The kernel has then problems reading input events and > might crash. These lock-ups should also be avoided in libsmbios, as that is > really ugly. However it needs root privileges and it's HAL who is calling it > again and again when it should not, so the lockups are more HAL's fault. > > Testing/repoducing: > 1: of course using gnome and gnome-power-manager, setting "Dim display when > idle" to enabled. > Same effects can be achieved by: > 2: using the command /usr/sbin/dellLcdBrightness from libsmbios-bin package. > Here's a command that rapidly switch brightness 10 times: > for x in `seq 1 10`; do sudo dellLcdBrightness -a -v 1;sleep 0.1; sudo > dellLcdBrightness -a -v 5; done > #Warning it may hang your machine > 3: the brightness applet of the gnome-panel. > > A possible elegant solution: > * Correct HAL's detection of brightness setting capability on dell, so that > it only reports it when it can be set with no errors. It might require using > some test method in libsmbios, which I don't know if it is present or has to > be added. > Maybe also add some way for HAL to read the bios password from config files > if the user wishes so. (This is probably somewhat already planned) > Solving the stalling in libsmbios might prevent crashes, but yet HAL would > keep calling it and get errors, so a fix in HAL is needed. > Less elegant: > turn off HAL's usage of libsmbios in one of its config files and have users > who want it to manually set it. > > possible temporary workarounds for users experiencing this: > - unset the bios password > - blacklist the dcdbas kernel module > - disable dimming in gnome-power > - I don't know how to disable this functionality from HAL, but that would be > the best workaround. > > NOTE: if HAL is allowed to use libsmbios a local user could exploit it to > induce a denial of service or crash. > > I hope this info proves clear and useful. For anything else just ask. >
-- HAL lockups/crashes on Dell D-series Latitudes w/ BIOS password https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/189814 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
